Art at TOMA
Yu-Kun YANG, born in 1934, was an abstract expressionist painter who started to study art in Hong Kong and continued his studies in Germany at the Berlin Academy of Art in the late 1950s. He did not study a particular style of painting as he own personality played the most important role: his sense for his materials, his feelings for the expressiveness of the different colours, they way he eschews external impressions to let loose the magic of the artistic means themselves so that they give his picture their form and their sense.
“Yu-Kun Yang was an artist fluent in the visual challenges of calligraphic gesture, abstraction and expression. His paintings create tensions and balances between the subjective richness of gesture notation and the more rationally-oriented interest of a minimalist aesthetic. Structuring, event subliminally restraining, large lyrically coloured brushstrokes within an all-over grid system alluded to with sequences of dashed points, he created works that suggest the human figure rendered in abstracted body-parts.
On one level, these works suggested a kinship with the fierce and primal imagery of humanity created by Jean Dubuffet and Willem De Kooning in their respective Woman series of the late 1950s. Yet, there is a consciousness in Yu-Kun’s work of the ambiguity of meaning inherent to gestural notation which at once places his images at a remove from Art Informa land Abstract Expressionism, suggesting a rethinking of the meaning and potential of gestural abstraction following the American and European developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, there are elements within his works which share a resonance with the reinterpretation of the gestural mark as transgressive rather than sublime, that rise in works of artists such as Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, or subsequently in the works of Markus Lupertz and Georg Baselitz.”
Asian Art News Magazine Collette Chattopadhyay, 1997
List of Various Exhibitions and Awards
Solo Exhibitions
- 1960 Gallery Dr Appel, Frankfurt, Germany
- 1960 Gallery Diogenes, Berlin, Germany
- 1962 Gallery Greichenbeisl, Vienna, Austria
- 1965 Gallery Benjamin Katz, Berlin Germany
- 1996 Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, USA
- 2009 Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, USA
- 2009 Les Roches, Mont-Saint-Jean, France
- 2011 Manoir de Cologny, Geneva, Switzerland
Group Exhibitions (from 1960 to 1965)
- Gallery Wiechert, Hamburg, Germany
- Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany
- Goethe Institute, Montreal, Canada
- Germany Cultural Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Frankfurt Romeiser, Rome, Italy
- Goethe Institute, Washington D.C., USA
- Staedtisches Museum, Flensburg, Germany
Awards
- 1956 Scholarship, City of Berlin, Germany
- 1963 Award of Young Art Exhibition in Vienna, Austria
- 1964 Award of Federal Associations of German Industry
- 1964 Fellowship Ford Foundation, New York, USA
- 1965 Fellowship Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA
- 1968 Fellowship The MacDowell Colony, USA
All the paintings on display at TOMA are for sale.